Chapter II

Worsel the Velantian, hard and durable and long-lived as Velantians are, had in twenty Tellurian years changed scarcely at all. As the first Lensman and the only Second-Stage Lensman of his race, the twenty years had been very fully occupied indeed.

He had solved the varied technological and administrative problems incident to the welding of Velantia into the structure of Civilization. He had worked at the many tasks which, in the opinion of the Galactic Council, fitted his peculiarly individual talents. In his "spare" time he had sought out in various parts of two galaxies, and had ruthlessly slain, widely-scattered groups of the Overlords of Delgon.

Continuously, however, he had taken an intense sort of godfatherly interest in the Kinnison children, particularly in Kit and in the youngest daughter, Constance; finding in the girl a mentality surprisingly akin to his own.

When Kinnison's call came he answered it. He was now out in space; not in the _Dauntless_, but in a ship of his own, under his own command. And what a ship! The _Velan_ was manned entirely by beings of his own race. It carried Velantian air, at Velantian temperature and pressure. Above all, it was built and powered for inert maneuvering at the atrocious accelerations employed by the Velantians in their daily lives; and Worsel loved it with enthusiasm and elan.

He had worked conscientiously and well with Kinnison and with other entities of Civilization. He and they had all known, however, that he could work more efficiently alone or with others of his own kind. Hence, except in emergencies, he had done so; and hence, except in similar emergencies, he would so continue to do.

Out in deep space, Worsel entwined himself, in a Velantian's idea of comfort, in an intricate series of figures-of-eight around a couple of parallel bars and relaxed in thought. There were insidious deviltries afoot, Kinnison had said. There were disaffections, psychoses, mass hysterias, and--Oh happy thought!--hallucinations. There were also certain revolutions and sundry uprisings, which might or might not be connected or associated with the disappearances of a considerable number of persons of note. In these latter, however, Worsel of Velantia was not interested. He knew without being told that Kinnison would pounce upon such blatant manifestations as those. He himself would work upon something much more to his taste.

Hallucination was Worsel's dish. He had been born among hallucinations, had been reared in an atmosphere of them. What he did not know about hallucinations could have been printed in pica upon the smallest one of his scales.

Therefore, isolating one section of his multicompartmented mind from all of the others and from any control over his physical self, he sensitized it to receive whatever hallucinatory influences might be abroad. Simultaneously he set two other parts of his mind to watch over the one to be victimized; to study and to analyze whatever figments of obtrusive mentality might be received and entertained.

Then, using all of his naturally tremendous sensitivity and reach, all of his Arisian supertraining, and the full power of his Lens, he sent his mental receptors out into space. And then, although the thought is staggeringly incomprehensible to any Tellurian or near-human mind, he _relaxed_. For day after day, as the _Velan_ hurtled randomly through the void, he hung blissfully slack upon his bars, most of his mind a welter of the indescribable thoughts in which it is a Velantian's joy to revel.

* * * * *

Suddenly, after an unknown interval of time, a thought impinged: a thought under the impact of which Worsel's body tightened so convulsively as to pull the bars a foot out of true. Overlords! The unmistakable, the body- and mind-paralyzing hunting call of the Overlords of Delgon!

His crew had not felt it yet, of course; nor would they feel it. If they should, they would be worse than useless in the conflict to come; for they could not withstand that baneful influence. Worsel could. Worsel was the only Velantian who could.

"Thought-screens all!" his commanding thought snapped out. Then, even before the order could be obeyed: "As you were!"

For the impenetrably shielded chambers of his mind told him immediately that this was no ordinary Delgonian hunting call; or rather, that it was more than that. Much more.

Mixed with, superimposed upon the overwhelming compulsion which generations of Velantians had come to know so bitterly and so well, were the very things for which he had been searching--hallucinations! To shield his crew or, except in the subtlest possible fashion himself, simply would not do. Overlords everywhere knew that there was at least one Velantian Lensman who was mentally their master; and, while they hated this Lensman tremendously, they feared him even more. Therefore, even though a Velantian was any Overlord's choicest prey, at the first indication of an ability to disobey their commands the monsters would cease entirely to radiate; would withdraw at once every strand of their far-flung mental nets into the fastnesses of their superbly hidden and indetectably shielded cavern.

Therefore Worsel allowed the inimical influence to take over, not only the total minds of his crew, but the unshielded portion of his own as well. And stealthily, so insidiously that no mind affected could discern the change, values gradually grew vague and reality began to alter.

Loyalty dimmed, and _esprit de corps_. Family ties and pride of race waned into meaninglessness. All concepts of Civilization, of the Galactic Patrol, degenerated into strengthless gossamer, into oblivion. And to replace those hitherto mighty motivations there crept in an overmastering need for, and the exact method of obtainment of, whatever it was that was each Velantian's deepest, most primal desire. Each crewman stared into an individual visiplate whose substance was to him as real and as solid as the metal of his ship had ever been; each saw upon that plate whatever it was that, consciously or unconsciously, he wanted to see. Noble or base, lofty or low, intellectual or physical, spiritual or carnal, it made no difference to the Overlords. Whatever each victim most wanted was there.

No figment was, however, even to the Velantians, actual or tangible. It was a picture upon a plate, transmitted from a well-defined point in space. There, upon that planet, was the actuality, eagerly awaited; toward and to that planet must the _Velan_ go at maximum blast. Into that line and at that blast, then, the pilots set their vessel without orders, and each of the crew saw upon his nonexistent plate that she had so been set. If she had not been, if the pilots had been able to offer any resistance, the crew would have slaughtered them out of hand. As it was, all was well.

And Worsel, watching the affected portion of his mind accept these hallucinations as truths and admiring unreservedly the consummate artistry with which the work was being done, was well content. He knew that only a hard, solidly-driven, individually probing beam could force him to reveal the fact that a portion of his mind and all of his bodily control were being withheld; he knew that unless he made a slip no such investigation was to be expected. He would not slip.

No human or near-human mind can really understand how the mind of a Velantian works. A Tellurian can, by dint of training, learn to do two or more unrelated things simultaneously. But neither is done very well and both must be more or less routine in nature. To perform any original or difficult operation successfully he must concentrate upon it, and he can concentrate upon only one thing at a time. A Velantian, however, can and does concentrate upon half-a-dozen totally unrelated things at once; and, with his multiplicity of arms, hands, and eyes, he can perform simultaneously an astonishing number of completely independent operations.

The Velantian is, however, in no sense such a multiple personality as would exist if six or eight human heads were mounted upon one body. There is no joint tenancy about it. There is only one ego permeating all those pseudoindependent compartments; no contradictory orders are, or ordinarily can be, sent along the bundled nerves of the spinal cord. While individual in thought and in the control of certain actions, the mind-compartments are basically, fundamentally, one mind.

Worsel had progressed beyond his fellows. He was different; unique. In fact, the perception of the need of the ability to isolate certain compartments of his mind, to separate them completely from his real ego, was one of the things which had enabled him to become the only Second-Stage Lensman of his race.

L2 Worsel, then, held himself aloof and observed appreciatively everything that went on. More, he did a little hallucinating of his own. Under the Overlords' compulsion he was supposed to remain motionless, staring raptly into an imaginary visiplate at an orgiastic saturnalia designed to make even his burly ego quail. Therefore, as far as the occupied portion of his mind and through it the Overlords were concerned, he did so. Actually, however, his body moved purposefully about, under the direction only of his own grim will; moved to make ready against the time of landing.

For Worsel knew that his opponents were not fools. He knew that they reduced their risks to the irreducible minimum. He knew that the mighty _Velan_, with her prodigious weaponry, would not be permitted to be within even extreme range of the cavern, if the Overlords could possibly prevent it, when that cavern's location was revealed. His was the task to see to it that she was not only within range, but was at the very portal.

* * * * *

The speeding spaceship approached the planet--went inert--matched the planetary intrinsic--landed. Her air locks opened. Her crew rushed out headlong, sprang into the air, and arrowed away _en masse_. Then Worsel, Grand Master of Hallucinations, went blithely but intensely to work.

Thus, although he stayed at the _Velan's_ control board instead of joining the glamoured Velantians in their rush over the unfamiliar terrain, and although the huge spaceship lifted lightly into the air and followed them, neither the fiend-possessed part of Worsel's mind, nor any of his fellows, nor through them the many Overlords, knew that either of those two things was happening. To that part of his mind Worsel's body was, under full control, flying along upon tireless wings in the midst of the crowd; to it and to all of the other Velantians and hence to the Overlords the _Velan_ lay motionless and deserted upon the rocks far below and behind them. They watched the vessel diminish in apparent size in the distance; they saw it vanish beyond the horizon!

This was eminently tricky work, necessitating as it did such nicety of synchronization with the Delgonian's own compulsions as to be indetectable even to the monsters themselves. Worsel was, however, an expert, one of the Universe's best; he went at the task not with any doubt whatever as to his ability to carry it through, but only with an uncontrollably shivering physical urge to come to grips with the hereditary enemies of his race.

The fliers shot downward, and as a boulder-camouflaged entrance yawned open in the mountain's side Worsel closed up and shot out a widely enveloping zone of thought-screen. The Overlords' control vanished. The Velantians, realizing instantaneously what had happened, flew madly back to their ship. They jammed through the air locks, flashed to their posts. The cavern's gates had closed by then, but the monsters had no screen fit to cope with the _Velan's_ tremendous batteries. Down they went. Barriers, bastions, and a considerable portion of the mountain's face flamed away in fiery vapor or flowed away in molten streams. Through reeking atmosphere, over red-hot debris, the armored Velantians flew to the attack.

The Overlords had, however, learned. This cavern, as well as being hidden, was defended by physical, as well as mental, means. There were inner barriers of metal and of force, there were armed and armored defenders who, dominated completely by the monsters, fought with the callous fury of the robots which in effect they were. Nevertheless, against all opposition, the attackers bored relentlessly in. Heavy semiportables blazed, hand-to-hand combat raged in the narrow confines of that noisome tunnel. In the wavering, glaring light of the contending beams and screens, through the hot and rankly stinking steam billowing away from the reeking walls, the invaders fought their way. One by one and group by group the defenders died where they stood and the Velantians drove onward over their burned and dismembered bodies.

Into the cavern at last. To the Overlords. Overlords! They, who for ages had preyed upon generation after generation of helpless Velantians, torturing their bodies to the point of death and then devouring ghoulishly the life-forces which their mangled bodies could no longer retain!

Worsel and his crew threw away their DeLameters. Only when it is absolutely necessary does any Velantian use any artificial weapon against any Overlord of Delgon. He is too furious, too berserk, to do so. He is scared to the core of his being; the cold grue of a thousand fiendishly eaten ancestors has bred that fear into the innermost atoms of his chemistry. But against that fear, negating and surmounting it, is a hatred of such depth and violence as no human being has ever known; a starkly savage hatred which can be even partially assuaged only by the ultimate of violences--by rending his foe apart member by member; by actually feeling the Delgonian's life depart under gripping hands and tearing talons and constricting body and shearing tail.

It is best, then, not to go into too fine detail as to this conflict. Since there were almost a hundred of the Delgonians--insensately vicious fighters when cornered--and since their physical make-up was very similar to the Velantians' own, many of Worsel's troopers died. But since the _Velan_ carried over fifteen hundred and since less than half of her personnel could even get into the cavern, there were plenty of them left to operate and to fight the spaceship.

* * * * *

Worsel took great care that the opposing commander was not killed with his minions. The fighting over, the Velantians chained this sole survivor into one of his own racks and stretched him out into immobility. Then, restraining by main strength the terrific urge to put the machine then and there to its fullest ghastly use, Worsel cut his screen, threw a couple of turns of tail around a convenient anchorage, and faced the Boskonian almost nose to nose. Eight weirdly stalked eyes curled out as he drove a probing thought-beam against the monster's shield.

"I could use this--or this--or this," Worsel gloated. As he touched various wheels and levers the chains hummed slightly, sparks flashed, the rigid body twitched. "I am not going to, however--yet. While you are still sane I want to take and I shall take your total knowledge."

And face to face, eye to eye, brain to brain, that silently and motionlessly cataclysmic battle was joined.

As has been said, Worsel had hunted down and had destroyed many Overlords. He had hunted them, however, like vermin. He had destroyed them with duodec bombs and with primary or secondary beams; or, at closest hand, with talons, teeth, and tail. He had not engaged an Overlord mind to mind for over twenty Tellurian years; not since he and Nadreck of Palain VII had captured alive the leaders of those who had been preying upon Helen's matriarchs and warring upon Civilization from their cavern upon Lyrane II. Nor had he ever dueled one mentally to death without powerful support; Kinnison or some other Lensman had always been near by.

But Worsel would need no help. He was not shivering in eagerness now. His body was as still as the solid rock upon which most of it lay; every chamber and every faculty of his mind was concentrated upon battering down or cutting through the Overlords' stubbornly-held shields.

Brighter and brighter glowed the Velantian's Lens, flooding the gloomy cave with pulsating polychromatic light. Alert for any possible trickery, guarding intently against any possibility of riposte or of counterthrust, Worsel leveled bolt after bolt of mental force. He surrounded the monster's mind with a searing, constricting field. He squeezed; relentlessly and with appalling power.

The Overlord was beaten. He, who had never before encountered a foreign mind or a vital force stronger than his own, knew that he was beaten. He knew that at long last he had met that half-fabulous Velantian Lensman with whom not one of his monstrous race could cope. He knew starkly, with the chilling, numbing terror possible only to such a being in such a position, that he was doomed to die the same hideous and long-drawn-out death which he had dealt out to so many others. He did not read into the mind of the bitterly vengeful, the implacably ferocious Velantian any more mercy or any more compunction than was actually there. He knew perfectly that of either there was no slightest trace. Knowing these things with the blackly appalling certainty that was his, he quailed.

There is an old but cogent saying that the brave man dies only once, the coward a thousand times. That Overlord, during that lethal combat, died more times than it is pleasant to contemplate. Nevertheless, he fought. A cornered rat will fight, and the Delgonian was not a rat--not exactly, that is, an ordinary rat. His mind was competent, keen, powerful, and utterly unscrupulous; and he brought to the defense of his beleaguered ego every resource of skill and of trickery and of sheer power at his command--in vain. Deeper and deeper, in spite of everything he could do, the relentless Lensman squeezed and smashed and cut and pried and bored; little by little the Overlord gave mental ground.

"This station is here ... this staff is here ... _I_ am here, then ... to wreak damage ... all possible damage ... to the commerce ... and to the personnel of ... the Galactic Patrol ... and Civilization in every aspect--" the Overlord admitted haltingly as Worsel's pressure became intolerable; but such admissions, however unwillingly made or however revealing in substance, were not enough.

Worsel wanted, and would be satisfied with nothing less than, his enemy's total knowledge. Hence he maintained his assault until, unable longer to withstand the frightful battering, the Overlord's barriers went completely down; until every convolution of his brain and every track of his mind lay open, helplessly exposed to Worsel's poignant scrutiny. Then, scarcely taking time to gloat over his victim, Worsel did scrutinize.

Period.

* * * * *

Hurtling through space, toward a definite objective now, Worsel studied and analyzed some of the things which he had just learned. Worsel was not surprised that this Overlord had not known any of his superior officers in things or enterprises Boskonian; that he did not consciously know even that he had been obeying orders or that he had superiors. That technique, by this time, was familiar enough. The Boskonian psychologists were able operators; to attempt to unravel the unknowable complexities of their subconscious compulsions would be a sheer waste of time.

What the Overlords had been doing, however, was clear enough. That outpost had indeed been wreaking havoc with Civilization's commerce. Ship after ship had been lured from its course; had been compelled to land upon this barren planet. Some of those vessels had been destroyed; some of them had been stripped and rifled as though by pirates of old; some of them had been set upon new courses with hulls, mechanical equipment, and cargoes untouched. No crewman or passenger, however, escaped unscathed; even though only ten percent of them died in the Overlordish fashion which Worsel knew so well.

The Overlord himself had wondered why they had not been able to kill them all. He knew that such forbearance was unnatural, was against all instinct and training. He knew that they wanted, intensely enough, to kill every one of their victims; that their greedy lust for life-force simply could not be sated as long as life-force was to be had. He knew only that something, none of them knew what, limited their actual killing to ten percent of the bag.

Worsel grinned wolfishly at that thought, even while he was admiring the quality of the psychology which could impress such a compulsion as that upon such rapacious hellions as those. That was the work of the Boskonian higher-ups, who knew that ten percent was the limit above which the deaths would have been too revealing to the statisticians of the Galactic Patrol.

The other ninety percent, however, the Delgonians had "played with"--a procedure which, although less satisfying to the Overlords than the ultimate treatment, was not very different in so far as the victims' egos were concerned. For none of them emerged from the ordeal with any memory of what had happened, or of what or who he had ever been. They were not all completely mad; some were only partially so. All had, however, been--altered. Changed; shockingly transformed. No two were alike. Each Overlord, it appeared, had striven with all of his ultra-hellish ingenuity to excel his fellows in the manufacture of an outrageous something whose like had never been seen in or upon any land or sea or air or throughout any reach of space.

These and many other facts and items Worsel had studied carefully. He was now heading for the region in which the Patrol's computers had figured that the "Hell Hole in Space" must lie. The planet he had just left, the Overlords he had just slain, were not the original Hell Hole; could have had nothing to do with it. Too far apart--they were not in the same possible volume of space.

Worsel knew now, though, what the Hell Hole in Space really was. It was a cavern of Overlords. It simply couldn't be anything else. And, in himself and his crew and his mighty _Velan_ he, Worsel of Velantia, Overlord-slayer par excellence of two galaxies, had in ample measure everything it took to extirpate any number of Overlords. With what he had just learned and with what he was so calmly certain he could do, the Hell Hole in Space would take no more toll. Wherefore Worsel, coiled loosely around his hard bars, relaxed in happily planful thought. And in a couple of hours a solid, clear-cut thought impinged upon his Lens.

"Worsel! Con calling. What goes on there, fellow old snake? You've stuck that sharp tail of yours into some of my business--I hope!"